![the manchurian candidate plot the manchurian candidate plot](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59092fd06552fa0be682ac83/1:1/w_1648,h_1648,c_limit/030915_r29678.jpg)
What The Manchurian Candidate suggests is that people are altogether suggestible, or maybe that while the worst are full of passionate intensity, the best-and likely the rest-lack all conviction.
![the manchurian candidate plot the manchurian candidate plot](https://alchetron.com/cdn/The-Manchurian-Candidate-2004-film-images-aabb7a64-7ec4-411f-90d4-25c72214c15.jpg)
When Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), who correctly suspects that he and Shaw’s heroic homecoming from Asia has happened under false pretenses, is told by his superior officer to take a mental health break, he bridles against the instruction before letting his eyes fall meekly to the floor. But while the film’s wildest and most memorable images come swathed in a somnambulistic fog-enough has been written over the years about the soberly surrealistic “Garden Party” sequence that I won’t waste space recapitulating it here-even fleeting exchanges express the difficulty of self-directed choices. The plot’s focus on mental manipulation is very much of its time: post-World War II advances in psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals led the American military to experiment with behaviour modification for a host of reasons (including the empathetic de-programming techniques showcased in John Huston’s suppressed 1946 documentary Let There Be Light), and the same thing was assumed of the Soviets under the anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-sooner impetus of the Cold War. Iselin is pulling Raymond’s strings.įree will is a precious commodity in short supply in The Manchurian Candidate. Even before instructing her hypnotized son to orchestrate the staged assassination of a presidential hopeful, Mrs. Raymond’s old lady stateside is his mother Eleanor, whose role as the soon-to-be-brainwashed sharpshooter’s “American operator” is both narratively shocking and slyly redundant. Like most of the jokes in George Axelrod’s screenplay-which stays true to the cold, cynical spirit of Richard Condon’s source novel while jazzing up the dialogue and characterizations-this one deepens upon reflection. The subject of the query is Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), whose lack of interest in the earthly delights on offer at a local brothel indicates a stubborn sense of fidelity (or, given Harvey’s familiar prissiness, possible homosexuality). “Does he have a girl back home?” That’s the question posed in the film’s first scene by the members of an American platoon stationed in Korea circa 1952. Rewatching The Manchurian Candidate in 2016, on the occasion of a gleaming new Blu-ray edition from Criterion, is an instructive lesson in how the passage of time normalizes that which was once appraised as outrageous-but without diminishing its power to shock, appal, and entertain.
![the manchurian candidate plot the manchurian candidate plot](https://media-temporary.preziusercontent.com/frames-public/9/1/9/4/c/a9cb2394b8385a3778b9b323bce380.jpeg)
Whatever else one can say about James Gregory’s McCarthy manqué “Big” Johnny Iselin-the title character of John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece-he’s good at taking direction from his handlers, whereas Trump seems resolutely unmanageable, his televised rallies projecting the atmosphere of a freakishly well-attended open-mic night at a comedy club in Hell. The idea that Donald Trump could memorize the sort of rousing, precisely written stump speech that Angela Lansbury’s Beltway Clytemnestra outlines near the climax of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is perhaps laughable in and of itself. The words of one Eleanor Iselin come to mind: “Rallying a nation of television viewers into hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law look like anarchy.” While the concept of Trump as a Democratic mole planted to divide and conquer the GOP, thus paving the way for a Clinton Presidency 2.0, was comically satisfying, the alternate hot take-that The Donald’s vociferous anti-Islamist rhetoric functioned dually as a recruiting tool for ISIS-became harder to laugh off as his public appearances incited greater and greater furor. In the waning days of 2015, public intellectuals as varied as Salman Rushdie, Bill Maher, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar floated (or sky-hooked) the notion that Donald Trump was a “Manchurian Candidate,” despite the fact that none of them-or the many, many pundits and think-piece artists mining the same vein of pop-culture reference-could agree exactly how the putative Republican frontrunner fulfilled that role.